Adapting to life after being diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome twenty years too late.

Tag Archives: Aspergers

I don’t like dancing. I state this as an empirical fact. Like the sky being blue because of the way light diffuses through our predominantly nitrogen based atmosphere; like pi being a number that isn’t exactly three or iambic pentameter is a sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables. I don’t like dancing.

At my cousin’s eighteenth fancy dress birthday party my undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome reared its ugly head once more. It was dark, noisy and there were lots of people there that I didn’t know. It was like a headache in a broom cupboard. I was sat waiting for to be over when a rather enthusiastic young Irish lady, who was a friend of my uncle’s, asked if I would like to dance with her. I refused politely, but, thinking that she was doing her best to cheer me up, she persisted and I kept declining her offer. But it didn’t end there as she tried to get me to dance twice more. Eventually, because it was a social situation I had no experience with I panicked and told her to “go away and leave me alone. I don’t want to dance with you, or anyone else, so please stop asking me!” As you would expect, this didn’t go down very well with my fellow party goers and my parents were very embarrassed and said they wouldn’t bring me to family parties any more if I did it again. If I got diagnosed when I was three, instead of twenty three years old they would have known I had Asperger’s Syndrome and understood what had happened.

It was my parents who scrimped the money together for a private diagnosis with one of the country’s leading experts in adult Asperger’s Syndrome. My mother and I had to fill in a pre-appointment questionnaire that mostly addressed my behaviour as a young child. The specialist very quickly confirmed that I had moderate/severe Asperger’s Syndrome, saying that he was surprised that it was noticed by my school teachers or my doctor. It turned out that my strange attitude towards food, such as being very picky and having a structured way of eating my food (in order of what will go cold the quickest) was a very telling sign.

Another way that he knew I had Asperger’s Syndrome was that I found open questions, such as, ‘are you boring?’ impossible to answer with a straight yes or no. He said it was because the condition often makes your brain very pedantic, which meant that I must seek more information from the person asking the question or to give a convoluted answer as a way of applying my own scaffolding to the question in order to answer it.

So there I was. Suddenly the whole world made sense at last. I felt both sad because I was told I have an incurable brain condition, but at the same time I was so relieved that the problems that I have had weren’t all my fault. It was like the ending to The Truman Show when Truman finally realises who he is and what the world really is for the first time. I was ready to walk through the door and move forward knowing, like my dad always says, that “There’s a good time coming”.

In 1992 I was three years old. I was, quite probably, one of the worst toddlers imaginable. I broke all of my toys trying to see inside them to find out how they worked. I broke most of my family’s stuff that wasn’t kept under lock and key. I even managed to break my baby cot and my parents had to keep repairing it with string. This only got worse as I got older.

At school I was awful, to the point where I was sent to all kinds of counsellors and behavioural psychologists. I was also sent to a dietitian to work out why most food made me feel nauseated when I tried to swallow it. My teacher at primary school invented a report card system to tackle my bad behaviour.

All the while my alienation from my peers grew, especially as I reached secondary school, where I received more counselling for my perceived “sadness”. I never had a girlfriend as I couldn’t interact very well with my peers because I always seemed so different, or weird, compared to other kids of my age. I worked towards getting the best qualifications I could so that I could become a teacher, as I always seemed to have academic talent, as I could read before I started school.

I managed to get into the university of my choice. I never did the freshers thing where new students get hammered and party all week, as the prospect of doing so made my stomach turn with anxiety. I received more counselling for social phobia/social anxiety, but alas, it never got to the bottom of why I found it very difficult to make friends. So I spent the bulk of my time nerding it up in the library for between six and eight hours at a time. I enjoyed the studying and it paid off: I got the second best degree class possible. I had no social life to detract from my work.

It was when I got accepted onto a highly competitive post-graduate teacher training course that set in motion a chain of events that would change how I perceive myself, and the rest of the world forever…